Of course , now that I'm back to 667 Mhz ram , the damn thing works fine.

I've reconsidered the death of this 680i.I am going to allow it an honorable death.

I might as well increase the whole learning curve , so I'm going to use mr. striker as my next victim for supercooling experiments.Might as well......I have ram too....I'll get a cheepo proc , do some custom modding werk and we'll see
.

I'm worried as well. I bought an 680i mobo a few months ago along with OZ SLI RAM. I haven't had time to install an OS on the system yet. I'm wondering if I should just buy another mobo since it seems 99% of people with 680i mobo's are dying. Any suggestions on a good SLI mobo?

While the RMA rate on the striker extreme is high (2x avg) , there are lots of people running them fine.

Here's the advice I can give you.

-The northbridge runs hot , and the cooling is sub-par. Here's what that means to you ; remove the chipset cooler/heatpipe assembly , remove the thermal crap on there and do it correctly with good thermal compound......Also make sure you have good airflow to the NB or even it's own fan.

Well I have a quad core, so I guess that's bad news for me :( I will definitely take your advice and re-apply a better thermal compound. The northbridge and MCP both have fans on my 680i SLI. I'm wondering if I should invest in better heatsinks and fans for both? Wonder if that might help? Think it would? Also I was thinking that perhaps I could get a Antec SpotCool and point it at the northbridge chip.

I wish i would have done some research before purchasing the XFX 680i mobo. I could have saved myself the trouble. But TigerDirect was selling it for $90 so thats why I jumped on it. I guess there is a reason why it was so cheap. At least now I know to do research on hardware before buying it.

I have a Cosmos 1000 case with plenty of room inside and fans. Hopefully this might help. Still worried though. Worse comes to worse and it does go up in smoke, I might get the Asus Maximus Extreme Motherboard or the Asus P5E3 Deluxe Motherboard. Which means the 4gbs of ram I have for the XFX 680i will be useless and need to buy all new DDR3 RAM.

Its too bad Asus doesn't have a mobo with 3 SLI slots and intel chipset.

As a Final note , I have my new Maximus formula sitting here.I am removing the chipset heatsinks and redoing the thermal compounds.....This means the 680i I am typing this on is free to become a victim for my evil cooling plans !!

I'm worried as well. I bought an 680i mobo a few months ago along with OZ SLI RAM. I haven't had time to install an OS on the system yet. I'm wondering if I should just buy another mobo since it seems 99% of people with 680i mobo's are dying. Any suggestions on a good SLI mobo?

according to ocz tech support you should manually set your ram voltage a little low in your bios to prevent possible problems. (mine is set to 2.1, but the ram is recommended to run at 2.3).

BrainEater - i hope you subject the board to some excruciating conditions (we need an 'evil grin' or 'twisted' smiley for moments like these).

heres another quick update from me...i tested my memory in another box (for the second time) to make sure it is not the cause of my problem, and its still ok (i cant run it higher than 666 mhz for more than an hour of orthos, but i tested it at 1100 mhz for 5 hours in a p35 with no errors). so im back to my plan of getting an intel based board, and eating the cost of this 680i. ill rma it again, but ill probably end up just sitting on the replacement they send me because im not comfortable using it for work, or even selling it, in case it doesnt work properly.

according to ocz tech support you should manually set your ram voltage a little low in your bios to prevent possible problems. (mine is set to 2.1, but the ram is recommended to run at 2.3).

BrainEater - i hope you subject the board to some excruciating conditions (we need an 'evil grin' or 'twisted' smiley for moments like these).

heres another quick update from me...i tested my memory in another box (for the second time) to make sure it is not the cause of my problem, and its still ok (i cant run it higher than 666 mhz for more than an hour of orthos, but i tested it at 1100 mhz for 5 hours in a p35 with no errors). so im back to my plan of getting an intel based board, and eating the cost of this 680i. ill rma it again, but ill probably end up just sitting on the replacement they send me because im not comfortable using it for work, or even selling it, in case it doesnt work properly.

I wish that, sincere & extremely heavy cursing was allowed here!!!

Remember I send my P5N32-E SLI back to ASUS due to instability issues?

Well I got my board back already a little while ago but I didn't really have time to do some thourough testing. As I started testing with the latest BIOS 1403, I set up the system with my E6850, 2Gb of Crucial PC28500 and my 8800GTS 640 OC. (Ps. I also use 2Gb of OZC Plat Rev. 2 cause my Crucials tend to give me a hard time)

Guess what?

Right! Slot 1 & 2 do not work at all! The slots are powered but my rig doesn't even post(the lights on the Crucial's are on). Slot 3 & 4 do work, but this doesn't allow me to run my memory dual channel!!!

I swapped/tried every single possible solution between my memory sets and I know the RAM sets are working since I tested them on my beautiful DS3L!!!

Oh and another thing? This board(Rev A2) overvolts like nuts! Set CPU to 1.33V -> 1.38V and RAM 2.10V -> 2.18V!

The only things I haven't tried are a fresh Windows install or a BIOS flash back to 1205 for example. Does anyone of you think that would help? Or should I just send it back to ASUS??

__________________Hardcore Folding at it's BEST! HWC - TPU.... There can be only one team in front! TPU, can you smell our *sses already?

did they send you a completely new board or did they 'fix' your old one? either way, it sucks. its hard to believe/understand how some people are having such terrible times using these boards, yet others are getting massive overclocks and great stability. i just want the ability to upgrade to a nice quad, and get another 8800 for sli *cries*...hopefully the 790i turns out to be a little more predictable in this regard. ill be keeping my eye on it for sure, but ill be doing so from an intel chipset lol..